Remember the Grotesque Benghazi Hearing?

Charlie is taking a well-deserved break this week. In his absence, we'll be remembering some of his greatest hits from throughout this election cycle. Here is his takedown of the House Select Committee on Benghazi after Hillary Clinton's appearance before that body, originally published on October 23, 2015.

—The Editors

As a public service, I would like to give the voters of Alabama's Second Congressional District a preview of one of the campaign commercials they are going to see next fall, when Congresswoman Martha Roby is running for re-election. There is going to be a serious movie-trailer in-a-world musical introduction and then a clip of Ms. Roby thundering at Hillary Rodham Clinton, "I don't know why that's funny. Did you have any in-person briefings? I don't find it funny at all…The reason I say it's not funny is because it went well into the night when our folks on the ground were still in danger, so I don't think it's funny to ask if you're alone the whole night." And then, Martha Roby—Not Afraid.

Paid For By The Committee To Re-Elect The Clueless.

What you will not see is Hillary Rodham Clinton's finally breaking into the gale of laughter she'd been suppressing for about seven hours, and those members of the gallery still conscious enough to laugh guffawing right along with her. This is because if you watched the hearings in real time, you would realize, in context, that in her outrage, Ms. Roby looked like nothing more than an angry nun who'd reached for her ruler only to realize that someone had switched in a vibrator on her. It was that kind of day. It was that kind of night. Well, if nothing else, HRC's stalwart performance scared Lincoln Chafee right out of the presidential campaign.

Feel the O'Malleymentum!

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I would like to take a minute to defuse one line of historical analysis that even kindly Doc Maddow fell partly victim to as the hearing finally wrapped up, and as Trey Gowdy returned to his office to fill in his Uncle Beldar on the events of the day. It was said by many people that one of the reasons that the hearing was such an embarrassment to representative democracy was that the overt partisanship set it apart from similar hearings into similar events, like the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, or the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, or the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Partly because HRC and her partisans on the committee had been relentless in pointing out these events as precedents for how dangerous overseas work can be, an argument developed that these previous congressional investigations had been productive exercises in bipartisanship. There was an element of what the most excellent Digby calls "Tipnronnie" nostalgia to this argument that serves to obscure the fact that these investigations are always political.

As has been relentlessly argued ever since the issue of Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! was first raised, in the wake of the Marine barracks bombing in 1983, a Democratic congress launched an investigation that had no public hearings and that produced a bipartisan report that parceled out the blame. Nobody, it is said, tried to "politicize" the event. History does not necessarily indicate that this was a good thing.

President Ronald Reagan, who was only mildly called to account for his administration's negligence in protecting Marines in a city where the United States embassy already was bombed, went on to deflect the nation's attention by invading Grenada, and he and his national-security team were emboldened to launch in full the various covert enterprises that came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Perhaps a little "politicization" of the investigation might have been a good thing.

In fact, it is the congressional investigation into Iran-Contra that gives the lie to the nostalgia for the good old days of bipartisan investigation. The special committee chaired by then-Senator Daniel Inouye was intensely political, both on the surface and behind the scenes. Part of the reason that it became so politicized was that Inouye went out of his way to be fair and bipartisan. Among his other decisions, he refused to let the committee subpoena either President Reagan or vice-president George H. W. Bush, the latter of whom was able to duck responsibility for having been hip-deep in the scheme all the way into the White House himself. As Sean Wilentz writes in the Age of Reagan,

"A strong Democrat, but a patriot first, Inouye wanted to promote a sense of national unity as well as probity in this new time of trouble. Yet Inouye's aversion to conflict led him and his colleagues to commit tactical errors that helped stack the deck in favor of the White House and its unwavering loyalists."

What resulted was an inconclusive investigation that produced two remarkable (and very political) events—the glorification of arms-peddling, Iran-enabling Oliver North, and the minority report of the committee, written by Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney, that was a blueprint for all the extraconstitutional atrocities that Cheney would commit between 2000 and 2009. Again, maybe a little partisanship would have led to different results.

The reason that Thursday's hearing looked so grotesque was not simply that it was a partisan dumbshow. It looked grotesque in the first place because what was being investigated was nothing. The Marine barracks really was destroyed. The Khobar Towers really did blow up. The Reagan administration really did sell weapons to the mullahs. What Gowdy and his merry band of meatheads was trying to find out already had been explained by a number of different investigations, and it still was unclear what Thursday's hearing was supposed to be getting at.

The other reason is that, for two midterm cycles now, the Republican base has been sending lightweights to represent it in a federal government that the base has grown to hate. Say what you will about Cheney, in terms of partisan political warfare, the man is a heavyweight. Instead, we got Roby, inadvertently stumbling into a wilderness of punchlines, and Lynn Westmoreland, who appeared to be lifted whole from Sam Drucker's store and plopped behind the committee table, and angry red balloons like Mike Pompeo and Peter Roskam.

Even chairman Gowdy is in Congress only because Bob Inglis proved too much of a liberal for a district down in the home office of American sedition. The Tea Party people are electing each other now. The problem with Thursday's fiasco was not that it was partisanship per se, but that it was an obviously amateur theatrical.

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